7 ms·

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against t

Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Haven't you had enough?

8jef 2y ago
Yes, that's why I've donated to the LadyBird project.
- ajdude 2y ago
  It's just weird that ladybird is picking ideological hills to die on, such as "no gender neutral pronouns"[1] [1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    You're not gonna die pissing off 0.1% of the population.
  - ZhongXina 2y ago
    It's an understandable reaction against a loud and aggressive (political) minority we've been seeing for the past four years. Thanks for the link, this finally pushed me to support the developer.
berkes 2y ago
How would that legal "protection" work in practice? What would it protect against? Who would it protect? What you say sounds reasonable. And I'm not trying to say "well, it's impossible because of some current status quo", because we could change that. What I'm trying to say is that we need this "industry" to work out the practicalities. Otherwise we are "protected" in a same way the GDPR protects us against 3rd part trackers (you don't need a cookie banner if you don't allow 3rd parties to track your users. Yet here we are...)
- eleveriven 2y ago
  I think legal protections can effectively safeguard user data
- talkin 2y ago
  Legal: “it’s forbidden to target ads at specific users” Done.
  - berkes 2y ago
    Sounds reasonable. But I highly doubt it removes the want for private data, though. Tracking is also there to measure performance, do AB tests, etc etc. I'm sure such a broad sweeping law would solve some. But it won't make the ad industry suddenly "good" or go away, or get purged or such.
  - SebastianKra 2y ago
    My perfect world would have a law against advertising in general. If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. Hopefully, the vacuum of people needing to know things would result in better independent Product reviews. And the vacuum of not spending 30% of your company budget on advertising would hopefully lead to sinking prices and people being more willing to spend on things that were previously funded by advertising.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      > If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. That already misses a huge problem though, I don't pay Mozilla for Firefox and I don't pay most online sites and services that gobble up my data and sell it off.
      - robin_reala 2y ago
        Mozilla has never given us a choice to pay for Firefox.
ho_schi 2y ago
Yep. One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL. They didn’t tried like programmers hack against bad things which never works in long term. The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM. We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we don’t like tracking, the solution is a law. But the EU Cookie-Directive of failed? Because malicious compliance, they made a business case out of it instead of ending it (cookies for logins are fine). And if we want public APIs, local computing and open-source the solutions are laws. The FSF uses the law :) Let us go a step further, change it.
- DyslexicAtheist 2y ago
  I was with you until secureboot. At least on my Debian I retain full control using the shim and my own enrolled keys. So seems less an issue with the technology but perhaps with how some vendors (that are already locking you in anyway) use secureboot? from https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot >> Shim then becomes the root of trust for all the other distro-provided UEFI programs. It embeds a further distro-specific CA key that is itself used for as a trust root for signing further programs (e.g. Linux, GRUB, fwupdate). This allows for a clean delegation of trust - the distros are then responsible for signing the rest of their packages. Shim itself should ideally not need to be updated very often, reducing the workload on the central auditing and CA teams.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Personally I don't get any benefits from secure boot and it is already used to verify the alleged integrity of systems. Not sure how using your own keys would work for remote attestation, it probably wouldn't. Healthy experience with the industry and the market tells me the future if such systems are widely adapted. And that would be a net negative for software freedom that is beyond the security gains, which can be reached through other means as well.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    In theory the benefits of secureboot around attestation and hashing/measuring of boot components do not require a secure/verifiable chain of custody. You could self verify using PCRs. The boot loader signing aspects were always for control and restricting devices, IMO.
jellykid 2y ago
When it comes to the internet... I'd prefer it to stay like the wild west. Least amount of regulation beyond something like net neutrality. People forget that the reason we have all of these "free" services is because of ads and that's coming from someone who hates ads. Every streaming subscription I have, I pay for the ad-free service. Let the people who don't know how to install a browser extension or change a few settings pay for these things for the rest of us.
- otachack 2y ago
  I have a feeling that is most people out there. I observed a friend of mine click on a malicious ad link recently in front of me when driving a presentation for a community meeting. It was shown as an overlay for a seemingly harmless site I found. In my home with a pihole I didn't see any of the ads. I felt terrible that I was partially responsible for her clicking it. This knowledge and habit of ad-blocking and secure computer usage takes factors of time, effort, and money to learn, and not everyone is going to, or is capable of, devoting what's needed.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    I agree; it seems worth it. My wife, who resisted dropping cable for the longest time, now prefers adless streaming and asks if wifi is down, because ads popped on her phone. If it has a downside, it is that my kid now is fascinated by ads, when we are in the wild. She normally does not see them and thus has no internal firewall built up.
- account42 2y ago
  > People forget that the reason we have all of these "free" services is because of ads and that's coming from someone who hates ads. People forget that before ad-supported "free" services took over we had community-run actually free services. The internet does not need ads.
- btylke 2y ago
  You may not see the ads in that content, but your data will still be collected and sold. This is where we lack fundamental protections.
eleveriven 2y ago
Agree, interventions are needed to protect consumers
hilbert42 2y ago
"ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection..." Absolutely true, but how do you expect that to happen or come about? Rampant advertising is similar to the copyright law problem. The majority of users may not like what's happening but their opposition and or dislike is but mild so when it comes to political action it collectively amounts to little more than nought. On the other hand, advertisers, like copyright holders, have strong vested interests thus are highly motivated to ensure politicians act in their favor (one only has to look at the lopsidedness of lobbying interests to see that). The real enemy is indifference, as a whole the citizenry is not motivated enough for things to change. Simply, we have ourselves to blame.
- temporarely 2y ago
  > Absolutely true, but how do you expect that to happen or come about? In the same manner through which legal protection for various other matters have come about. By raising awareness, sharing thoughts and solutions, and organizing.
_heimdall 2y ago
Anyone bothered enough by advertising can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads, or find ways to remove the advertising. More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > Anyone bothered enough by advertising I don't particularly have an issue with advertising itself. If adverts get on my nerves on a product or page I just leave, as you suggest: problem solved. The actual issue is the stalky tracking of me throughout my life that is currently inseparable from the advertising. I can't just walk away from that: it happens behind my back, it has happened before I get the chance to walk away. > can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme. > or find ways to remove the advertising. Which is, while I do take part, an ultimately fruitless task. Every block we make for the stalky behaviour, be it technical or legislative (other than outright banning the tracking of personal data except with explicit opt-in without exceptions, and properly enforcing punishments for breaking the ban), they'll find a way around. Removing it is not a long term solution, it is a war or attrition where we have to have our guard up all the time and they only have to get lucky, or just be particularly sneaky, every now and again. > More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme. You could make some real progress without being a hermit though, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Don't use a smartphone, limit as much of your time online as you can, and pay in cash when you can. Those wouldn't make you a hermit but would seriously limit the data you make available to be gobbled up in the first place. > This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property. Well that's actually what I see as a better approach, remove protections for those companies and industries rather than trying to create new laws to limit them. Its a strange balancing act to attempt to both protect and limit an industry with different laws, we would be better off not doing either.
sneak 2y ago
What is happening today that you don’t want to happen in the future? What would these political solutions achieve that aren’t achievable instantly today via technical solutions? Most people don’t care about what the ad industry is doing.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
[flagged]
- robin_reala 2y ago
  €5? Meta alone generates over that in ARPU in the EU, and 3× that in the US. And that’s for everyone, not just the salaried subset.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Yes, yes! Excellent! Then that system can also be improved, so that important websites get more money from a visit because they need the support more. For example the Arch Linux wiki. And also the system should have a blocklist so that dangerous and undemocratic websites do not get any money from the visitors. Also, individuals who are richer should have more of their salary deducted, since they can afford it, and people who have low income or belong to groups who need special protection should not have to pay, instead they should be paid a monthly internet allowance by the government, which can increase if they visit websites who are beneficial to them and to society. For example the Arch Linux wiki.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Take from the rich, give to the docs!
  - lofaszvanitt 2y ago
    Nah, there should be a max upper limit. So if you have a cooking site and you run it as one person you couldn't get more than, let's say 3k eur monthly. Arch linux wiki needs love, I agree. There are nuances that need to be ironed out with this approach, but at least we can guarantee that if someone works for the common good, that individual also gets something back, can keep a straight backbone and not beg for money.
- teeray 2y ago
  > People can still run them, but why would you Because there’s always some MBA thinking “Wait! We can charge them AND show them ads too!” They need to be legally barred from doing that.
mihaaly 2y ago
[flagged]
pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Only legal form of advertising should be in public marketplaces, that is it.
throw10920 2y ago
Please don't engage in this blatant political activism and flamebait here. This is anti-intellectual and not what I want to see on HN. I agree that something needs to be done about the ad industry and rampant data collection, but your emotionally manipulative comments are not it, and actively make it harder to discuss solutions to the problem.
- dartos 2y ago
  How so?
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. > The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". Emotional pleading, charged language, snuck premises. > The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Obvious political pandering/dogwhistling. > Haven't you had enough? Obvious call to action. Throughout the whole comment, zero logic or reasoning, zero useful information, zero actual solutions presented. This comment is devoid of any value whatsoever and completely inappropriate for HN. I wouldn't even want this on Reddit.
gaoshan 2y ago
"The market" needs to be checked in so many ways. You'd think that by now we could learn to take what works and modify the rest but apparently everything has to be black and white and even a concept like "the market" ends up bound by dogma.
dfxm12 2y ago
There's an election in a few months. Now is the time to write to the candidates and tell them to do something about it.

8jef 2y ago

Yes, that's why I've donated to the LadyBird project.

ajdude 2y ago
It's just weird that ladybird is picking ideological hills to die on, such as "no gender neutral pronouns"[1] [1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  You're not gonna die pissing off 0.1% of the population.
- ZhongXina 2y ago
  It's an understandable reaction against a loud and aggressive (political) minority we've been seeing for the past four years. Thanks for the link, this finally pushed me to support the developer.

berkes 2y ago

How would that legal "protection" work in practice? What would it protect against? Who would it protect? What you say sounds reasonable. And I'm not trying to say "well, it's impossible because of some current status quo", because we could change that. What I'm trying to say is that we need this "industry" to work out the practicalities. Otherwise we are "protected" in a same way the GDPR protects us against 3rd part trackers (you don't need a cookie banner if you don't allow 3rd parties to track your users. Yet here we are...)

eleveriven 2y ago
I think legal protections can effectively safeguard user data
talkin 2y ago
Legal: “it’s forbidden to target ads at specific users” Done.
- berkes 2y ago
  Sounds reasonable. But I highly doubt it removes the want for private data, though. Tracking is also there to measure performance, do AB tests, etc etc. I'm sure such a broad sweeping law would solve some. But it won't make the ad industry suddenly "good" or go away, or get purged or such.
- SebastianKra 2y ago
  My perfect world would have a law against advertising in general. If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. Hopefully, the vacuum of people needing to know things would result in better independent Product reviews. And the vacuum of not spending 30% of your company budget on advertising would hopefully lead to sinking prices and people being more willing to spend on things that were previously funded by advertising.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. That already misses a huge problem though, I don't pay Mozilla for Firefox and I don't pay most online sites and services that gobble up my data and sell it off.
    - robin_reala 2y ago
      Mozilla has never given us a choice to pay for Firefox.

ho_schi 2y ago

Yep. One of the things which the FSF did right was the GPL. They didn’t tried like programmers hack against bad things which never works in long term. The bad people will change the API, lock the bootloader, implement a problematic standard (ACPI, SecureBoot) or add more DRM. We cannot solve political issues (law) with technical solutions (programming). If we don’t like locked iPhones, the solution is a law. If we don’t like tracking, the solution is a law. But the EU Cookie-Directive of failed? Because malicious compliance, they made a business case out of it instead of ending it (cookies for logins are fine). And if we want public APIs, local computing and open-source the solutions are laws. The FSF uses the law :) Let us go a step further, change it.

DyslexicAtheist 2y ago
I was with you until secureboot. At least on my Debian I retain full control using the shim and my own enrolled keys. So seems less an issue with the technology but perhaps with how some vendors (that are already locking you in anyway) use secureboot? from https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot >> Shim then becomes the root of trust for all the other distro-provided UEFI programs. It embeds a further distro-specific CA key that is itself used for as a trust root for signing further programs (e.g. Linux, GRUB, fwupdate). This allows for a clean delegation of trust - the distros are then responsible for signing the rest of their packages. Shim itself should ideally not need to be updated very often, reducing the workload on the central auditing and CA teams.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Personally I don't get any benefits from secure boot and it is already used to verify the alleged integrity of systems. Not sure how using your own keys would work for remote attestation, it probably wouldn't. Healthy experience with the industry and the market tells me the future if such systems are widely adapted. And that would be a net negative for software freedom that is beyond the security gains, which can be reached through other means as well.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  In theory the benefits of secureboot around attestation and hashing/measuring of boot components do not require a secure/verifiable chain of custody. You could self verify using PCRs. The boot loader signing aspects were always for control and restricting devices, IMO.

jellykid 2y ago

When it comes to the internet... I'd prefer it to stay like the wild west. Least amount of regulation beyond something like net neutrality. People forget that the reason we have all of these "free" services is because of ads and that's coming from someone who hates ads. Every streaming subscription I have, I pay for the ad-free service. Let the people who don't know how to install a browser extension or change a few settings pay for these things for the rest of us.

otachack 2y ago
I have a feeling that is most people out there. I observed a friend of mine click on a malicious ad link recently in front of me when driving a presentation for a community meeting. It was shown as an overlay for a seemingly harmless site I found. In my home with a pihole I didn't see any of the ads. I felt terrible that I was partially responsible for her clicking it. This knowledge and habit of ad-blocking and secure computer usage takes factors of time, effort, and money to learn, and not everyone is going to, or is capable of, devoting what's needed.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  I agree; it seems worth it. My wife, who resisted dropping cable for the longest time, now prefers adless streaming and asks if wifi is down, because ads popped on her phone. If it has a downside, it is that my kid now is fascinated by ads, when we are in the wild. She normally does not see them and thus has no internal firewall built up.
account42 2y ago
> People forget that the reason we have all of these "free" services is because of ads and that's coming from someone who hates ads. People forget that before ad-supported "free" services took over we had community-run actually free services. The internet does not need ads.
btylke 2y ago
You may not see the ads in that content, but your data will still be collected and sold. This is where we lack fundamental protections.

eleveriven 2y ago

Agree, interventions are needed to protect consumers

hilbert42 2y ago

"ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection..." Absolutely true, but how do you expect that to happen or come about? Rampant advertising is similar to the copyright law problem. The majority of users may not like what's happening but their opposition and or dislike is but mild so when it comes to political action it collectively amounts to little more than nought. On the other hand, advertisers, like copyright holders, have strong vested interests thus are highly motivated to ensure politicians act in their favor (one only has to look at the lopsidedness of lobbying interests to see that). The real enemy is indifference, as a whole the citizenry is not motivated enough for things to change. Simply, we have ourselves to blame.

temporarely 2y ago
> Absolutely true, but how do you expect that to happen or come about? In the same manner through which legal protection for various other matters have come about. By raising awareness, sharing thoughts and solutions, and organizing.

_heimdall 2y ago

Anyone bothered enough by advertising can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads, or find ways to remove the advertising. More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. If consumers care enough they'll change their usage, if they don't change their usage they likely don't care enough.

dspillett 2y ago
> Anyone bothered enough by advertising I don't particularly have an issue with advertising itself. If adverts get on my nerves on a product or page I just leave, as you suggest: problem solved. The actual issue is the stalky tracking of me throughout my life that is currently inseparable from the advertising. I can't just walk away from that: it happens behind my back, it has happened before I get the chance to walk away. > can stop using whatever product has been ruined by ads Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme. > or find ways to remove the advertising. Which is, while I do take part, an ultimately fruitless task. Every block we make for the stalky behaviour, be it technical or legislative (other than outright banning the tracking of personal data except with explicit opt-in without exceptions, and properly enforcing punishments for breaking the ban), they'll find a way around. Removing it is not a long term solution, it is a war or attrition where we have to have our guard up all the time and they only have to get lucky, or just be particularly sneaky, every now and again. > More laws and larger governments doesn't have to be the answer to all problems. This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > Which will not stop the stalky behaviour of the ad industry. They'll still track me if I happen to click the wrong thing, or track me through my connections to other people. I suppose I could walk away from life and become a hermit, but that would be just a little extreme. You could make some real progress without being a hermit though, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Don't use a smartphone, limit as much of your time online as you can, and pay in cash when you can. Those wouldn't make you a hermit but would seriously limit the data you make available to be gobbled up in the first place. > This has often been said by companies and their shills. Oddly, they are all in favour of extra laws and government reach when it is, for example, to protect what they consider to be their intellectual property. Well that's actually what I see as a better approach, remove protections for those companies and industries rather than trying to create new laws to limit them. Its a strange balancing act to attempt to both protect and limit an industry with different laws, we would be better off not doing either.

sneak 2y ago

What is happening today that you don’t want to happen in the future? What would these political solutions achieve that aren’t achievable instantly today via technical solutions? Most people don’t care about what the ad industry is doing.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

[flagged]

robin_reala 2y ago
€5? Meta alone generates over that in ARPU in the EU, and 3× that in the US. And that’s for everyone, not just the salaried subset.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Yes, yes! Excellent! Then that system can also be improved, so that important websites get more money from a visit because they need the support more. For example the Arch Linux wiki. And also the system should have a blocklist so that dangerous and undemocratic websites do not get any money from the visitors. Also, individuals who are richer should have more of their salary deducted, since they can afford it, and people who have low income or belong to groups who need special protection should not have to pay, instead they should be paid a monthly internet allowance by the government, which can increase if they visit websites who are beneficial to them and to society. For example the Arch Linux wiki.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Take from the rich, give to the docs!
- lofaszvanitt 2y ago
  Nah, there should be a max upper limit. So if you have a cooking site and you run it as one person you couldn't get more than, let's say 3k eur monthly. Arch linux wiki needs love, I agree. There are nuances that need to be ironed out with this approach, but at least we can guarantee that if someone works for the common good, that individual also gets something back, can keep a straight backbone and not beg for money.
teeray 2y ago
> People can still run them, but why would you Because there’s always some MBA thinking “Wait! We can charge them AND show them ads too!” They need to be legally barred from doing that.

mihaaly 2y ago

[flagged]

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

Only legal form of advertising should be in public marketplaces, that is it.

throw10920 2y ago

Please don't engage in this blatant political activism and flamebait here. This is anti-intellectual and not what I want to see on HN. I agree that something needs to be done about the ad industry and rampant data collection, but your emotionally manipulative comments are not it, and actively make it harder to discuss solutions to the problem.

dartos 2y ago
How so?
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Enough of this waiting for virtuous entities to address legitimate concerns of the public. > The "ad industry" is a cancer and we need legal protection against this "industry". Emotional pleading, charged language, snuck premises. > The solution is political not technical and definitely can not be left to "the market". Obvious political pandering/dogwhistling. > Haven't you had enough? Obvious call to action. Throughout the whole comment, zero logic or reasoning, zero useful information, zero actual solutions presented. This comment is devoid of any value whatsoever and completely inappropriate for HN. I wouldn't even want this on Reddit.

gaoshan 2y ago

"The market" needs to be checked in so many ways. You'd think that by now we could learn to take what works and modify the rest but apparently everything has to be black and white and even a concept like "the market" ends up bound by dogma.

dfxm12 2y ago

There's an election in a few months. Now is the time to write to the candidates and tell them to do something about it.